"It might not be that the picture is "stirring" this I am just thinking about it in general."

Titus you could always perform some controlled experiments to see where the truth lies. Set up a room full of Obama pictures and another room full of Bush pictures and another room full of pictures in general and lots of tissues in all the rooms and learn where your thoughts lead you. My money is on Bush as being the culprit, ironically.

It's a thankless job because the White House occupants tend to believe they can do everything and should do everything.

I'd prefer a president who knows when to say "that's not the govt's job" and who was confident enough to clam up every so often. So we don't have to hear his name every stinking day on the news. But I guess that would freak out the MSM.

This is like the Michelle alongside Barry clip. Obama has no magic left compared to whomever there is. The stampede you hear is GOP candidates rushing in to file claims to the nomination that no one, except Palin, wanted to touch with a ten foot pole a year ago.

I don't get a warm fuzzy feeling from either of these guys. The guy on the left gives off a vibe evocative of .......[insert name of crazy European leader who you are not allowed to mention on internet because his name ends all threads] The guy on the right looks like he might not make it to the next rest area.

In searching for the Alfred E. Newman picture I came across this, pretty funny:

Newspaper Runs Out Of Anti-Bush Headlines....As a result, the once elaborate and artistic headlines in the papers are being commonly replaced today by such bland and meaningless titles as "Bush is Bush" and the rather implausible "Bush Eats Condors For Breakfast."

(The Crypto Jew)Joe, I just think it's funny that people are reading all kinds of noble characteristics into Bush's expression, when to me it says, "Dang, it didn't go in."

My advice, avoid the golf images. Again, when I read the post, I read, “Obama, dang missed the putt”…not Bush. Because after all who’s saddled with Golfing whilst Rome Burns? Oh yeah, Obama…will not cease work until the hole is filled, UNLESS I’m on the links, Obama.

My guess he's blaming Bush for something. Either that or fat cats on wall street, or do nothing republicans who won't help out, but who can't have the keys to the car because they can't drive and caused the whole mess anyway.

Not the point, C3, just couldn't pass up the chance to high-light the diff between a true Patriot (deficiencies aplenty tho he undoubtedly had/has) and a post-modernist, post-colonial, leftist neo-Stalinist who at heart detests this nation as presently constituted and is striving mightily to change it into a leftist nirvana his jumped-up --she of her late no-show $300,000/yr job--affirmative-action wife can be proud of..

The Drill SGT said... I wasn't a big Bushie fan, but he's starting to look a lot better in comparison.====================That is like Ford being damned with the faint praise that Jimmy Carter was so bad he was making Ford look smart and Presidential by comparison.

On the other hand, Obama looked like Nolan Effin' Ryan compared to Charlie Crist's wild pitch during this year's Tampa Bay debacle in the playoffs. That's the difference between major league sucking and Hall of Fame sucking.

No Bush nostalgia here. Bush nearly destroyed the Republican Party with his "compassionate conservative" cognitive dissonance. Open borders, giant deficits, federal meddling in education, nation-building projects, etc., all in the name of conservativism. If it hadn't been for Bush, we wouldn't have had Obama, so I see them linked.

Thank god for the Tea Party, which, as Peggy Noonan pointed out the other day, is removing the "Bushism" from the GOP.

One racked up billions of dollars of debt helping plunge the country down the ______. The other racked up billions of dollars of debt trying to pull it out. You mean "the other racked up TRILLIONS of dollars falsely promising to pull it out." The liquidity crisis was temporary; the national debt is eternal, unless we pull the plug on the government's power to borrow.

My feelings at viewing the photos are "Here goes Althouse on another of her Drudge feng shui musings." One is facing right. The other is facing leftward, but I think he's playing up the "demonic" angle with the photo of Obama. Those lines on his face seem to be enhanced.

One racked up billions of dollars of debt helping plunge the country down the ______. The other racked up billions of dollars of debt trying to pull it out. Obama has racked up trillions. That's like getting the same candy bar Bush sold us for $1.00 at the new low price of $1000.00 under Obama.

We most likely are too far gone to fix things and need full revolution in this country, a new OS kernel, rewrite the bill of rights to include rights (and formalized checks and balances) against our corporate as well as our government masters- nuke corporate personhood - as well as rights against International Tyranny etc. etc. -

but I'm coming up on middle age and slowing down just a bit, and someone else will have to do it because I frankly don't have the energy to even seriously wish for it anymore.

But that's my best, most truthful call when I look at both their faces juxtaposed like that - oh and I don't personally hate either one of them.

I also don't think we currently have the brainpower in motion to do it right, so we'll just limp along awhile longer on the older, broken system which still might be better than anything we could put together now.

1. Am I not pretty? My whole family is so pretty. Take heart. Have hope. Up is down; that is my pledge. What's more, I can easily speechify for four years.

2. Shh, I'm listening to God. He's telling me... where Bin Laden is... and how to beat Al Qaeda... and how to save our economy... my daddy is God... they tried to kill my daddy... they tried to kill God.

Former Law Student wrote:Clinton reduced the National Debt as a percent of GDP for the first time since the Carter administration.

But Clinton also deregulated the banks, the very thing that the dems now say brought down the economy. He also expanded housing for poor people by opeing up the CRA. And it was only a projected surplus anyway. Not an actual one.But I can see dems taking credit for the economy, but why not the bad parts too? You take the good and the bad, and there you have the facts of life. The facts of life.

But Clinton also deregulated the banks, the very thing that the dems now say brought down the economy. He also expanded housing for poor people by opeing up the CRA. And it was only a projected surplus anyway. Not an actual one.

So much misinformation, so little time. Let's start with the Clinton surpluses.

Correcting for inflation, budgets from the Clinton administration were in surplus for 1998-2001.

Then the very first time we gave Bush the keys to the economy, he ran a deficit:2002 -172.7It just got worse from there as W's tax cuts combined with the Iraq war expenses:2003 -402.82004 -428.02005 -318.32006 -239.62007 -151.12008 -415.82009-1279.6

The chief villain in the economic meltdown was not the repeal of Glass-Steagall, but the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000, which passed as a rider to the 2000 budget bill in the lame-duck session in December. This deliberate decision not to regulate structured finncial products such as credit derivatives nearly toppled the world economy.

Janet Tavakoli, author of two books on structured finance, has perhaps the best handle on what happened. Please read her articles.

My understanding:

Low interest rates made all debt instruments unattractive investments. The junk bond era was over. Sub prime mortgage loans were about the only paper that paid a decent return, but as with junk bonds, the risk of the borrowers' defaulting was priced into them -- hence they were sub-prime.

Some genius decided by bundling a lot of risky loans together they would create a low-risk investment -- while any individual was likely to default, they couldn't all default at once, could they? Backing up this belief, the bundlers assumed the borrowers would pay back the loans as if they had been prime conventional borrowers: 20% down/30 year loans.

The geniuses who created these divided them into tranches, and got the bond rating agencies to arbitrarily rate some tranches at the highest investment grade.

But not only, that, they created credit default swaps that shoved the risk of borrower default onto someone else. In fact the creators of the loan bundles actually were betting their creations would become worthless.

And the people they sold the swaps to sold swaps to other people, and so on.

The whole thing was a massive house of cards. But everybody who created and sold one of these turds got handsomely paid for doing so.